Chapter 2

Petra didn't look at them. She couldn't.

The wind met her like a physical blow. The storm had arrived early, howling down from the Arctic wastes like a pack of starved hounds. Fine, needles of frozen sleet ripped through her linen clothes, scouring her skin until every nerve burned.

She staggered forward, one foot dragging in front of the other. The severance wound at the base of her skull throbbed with a sickening, rhythmic pulse, sending waves of nausea through her abdomen. Without the residual aura of the pack bond to regulate her body temperature, hypothermia sank its teeth into her extremities within minutes.

Her fingers turned pale waxy white, then an ominous, numb blue.

*Keep walking,* she told herself, the whisper hollow in the howling dark. *Just die where they don't have to look at you. Keep Wyatt safe. Let the mirror be satisfied.*

Even now, shivering so hard her teeth clattered against each other, the poison of her upbringing held sway. For twenty years, Elder Corin had hammered the doctrine into the ears of every orphaned, wolf-less runt in the scullery: *The pack is the body; the individual is merely a claw, an ear, an expendable hair. If the limb rots, it must be severed for the survival of the heart.*

She had believed it. She had loved the pack that despised her. She had worshipped the ground Wyatt walked on, believing his occasional curt nods of thanks were tokens of genuine grace.

Petra climbed higher, driven by the morbid instinct of an animal seeking a quiet place to curl up and expire. She found a narrow cleft beneath an overhanging shelf of black basalt, where the wind was somewhat muted, though the frost coated the stone like pulverized glass.

She collapsed into the corner, pulling her knees to her chest. Her breath came in shallow, ragged puffs of gray steam. The cold was no longer sharp; it had transitioned into that deceptive, soothing warmth that precedes death. Her vision blurred, softening the jagged contours of the ice-choked crags.

*I am sorry,* she thought, closing her eyes as the dark edges of unconsciousness closed in. *I was never strong enough to be what you needed.*

A low, guttural rasp scraped through the howl of the storm.

Petra forced her eyelids open. The frost clinging to her lashes snapped like brittle twigs.

Ten yards away, crouching at the lip of the cleft, stood a rogue.

It was barely a wolf anymore. It was an emaciated engine of bone and graying, mange-scarred hide, its spine arching like a saw blade beneath taut skin. Foam, frozen into crystalline icicles, hung from its split jowls. A pair of sunken, cataract-milky eyes fixed on Petra with the singular, maddened clarity of absolute starvation.

A northern exile. A beast that had lost its mind to the solitary frost years ago.

Behind it, two more shapes detached from the swirling blizzard—lower, leaner, their ribs clearly visible through patchy coats. They were a scavenger pack, trailing the scent of fresh blood that dripped steadily from the severed mark on the nape of her neck.

Petra did not scream. There was no breath left in her lungs to form the sound, and no one within fifty miles would care if she did.

*This is it,* she thought. A strange, hollow peace settled over her. *The scavengers will scatter my bones. In the spring, nothing will remain of the curse. Jericho will be safe.*

The alpha of the three rogues dropped its front quarters, its black gums peeling back to reveal yellowed, broken teeth. It launched itself across the frozen snow with a wet, ravenous snarl.

Petra closed her eyes and waited for the tearing of her throat.

The impact hit her chest like an anvil. The rogue slammed her back against the basalt wall, its rancid, rotting breath washing over her face. Sharp, needle-like claws dug into her shoulders, pinning her down. The wolf snapped its jaws, aiming straight for her jugular.

At that split second, something deep beneath Petra’s breastbone—something that had slept beneath miles of ice for twenty years—snapped.

It was not a conscious thought. It was an ancient, violent refusal.

*Why must I bleed so they can feast?*

The question detonated in her mind with the force of an avalanche.

*Why must I be the meal?*

As the rogue’s fangs scraped the skin of her throat, breaking the surface, Petra’s hands moved without her permission. Her fingers, frozen stiff a heartbeat ago, hooked like talons. She seized the rogue by the scruff of its thick, matted neck and shoved upward with a savagery that did not belong to a half-starved scullery girl.

The rogue yelped, startled by the sudden resistance, its back legs scrambling for purchase on the ice.

Beneath the severed flesh at the base of Petra’s skull, the wound stopped bleeding.

It did not scab over. It froze.

A crackling, metallic sound echoed inside her skull, like thick river ice rupturing under the spring thaw. The place where the Jericho pack mark had been carved—the brand of laurels and oak that had supposedly tied her to life—suddenly felt scorching hot. Not the heat of fire, but the blinding, absolute burn of sub-zero frost.

*A seal,* a voice rumbled in the cavern of her soul. It was not the voice of a young girl, nor the timid whisper of an omega. It was the roar of a glacier calving into a black sea, ancient, colossal, and filled with terrible, frozen wrath. *They did not mark you to keep you. They marked you to bind you.*

The realization crashed through Petra’s dying mind like a broadaxe through kindling.

Jericho’s pack mark had never been an embrace. It had been a leash. A parasite.

For twenty years, the elders’ brand had acted as an iron siphon, sitting directly atop the primary conduit of her spiritual core, drinking her dormant power day after day to feed the pack’s territorial wards, while keeping her inner beast throttled, scentless, and blind in the dark. They had called her empty while drinking her dry. And when the ancient mirror cracked—when the seal began to fray under the immense, swelling pressure of what she truly was—they had thrown her away to die before she could awaken.

*They severed the seal themselves,* the ancient voice laughed, a sound like grinding stones. *The fools cut the lock off the cage.*

A blast of pure, cerulean-blue frost exploded outward from Petra’s chest.

The rogue pinning her was blasted backward into the blizzard, howling in agony as the sudden shockwave of freezing kinetic force shattered its ribs. It tumbled through the snow, leaving a trail of crystallized blood.

The other two rogues halted instantly, their ears flattening against their skulls, whimpering as the air around the cleft plummeted forty degrees in a single second.

Petra stood up.

She did not rise slowly. Her spine straightened with an audible, resonant crackle of shifting bone. The agonizing numbness in her fingers vanished, replaced by an electric, predatory heat that roared through her veins like liquid lightning. The sleet did not touch her anymore; the snowflakes vaporized into faint wisps of white vapor inches from her bare skin.

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